Over analysis
by EgotisticalIndustries
Summary: The mass effect universe (more specifically eezo) has a great amount of potential that the writers missed. For one, a device the size of a tissue box could theoretically one-shot harbinger without being a ridiculously advanced piece of incomprehensible transapientech. This is my over analysis of the physics behind mass effect, in an attempt to see what the writers missed.
1. Chapter 1

**Essay: the physics and exploitation of mass effect fields**

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As the name implies, this is an attempt to analyze the possibilities opened up by eezo both considered by the game and not. I will start with FTL (and the absolutely terrifying weaponry derived from it), then the technology seen in the games, before going through various technologies that the games failed to explore.

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**FTL: destroyer of worlds**

The mass effect FTL drive works via reducing the mass of everything in range, which both locally increases c and makes the ship capable of getting kore delta v out of a given unit of fuel. Assuming that the same mass fraction can reach the same fraction of c after mass shifting is taken into account, that civilian ships travel at 3000 (external) c, that the unaltered delta v of a civilian ship is roughly 3,000 km/s, and that to save fuel only 600 km/s worth of fuel is burned per normal interstellar transit reveals that the internal speed of light within the mass effect field is approximately ~900,000,000,000,000 m/s compared to the normal ~300,000,000 m/s in the rest of the universe with the ship traveling at ~900,000,000,000 m/s . But how does this destroy a planet? The answer comes from mass accelerators, in them a projectile's mass is reduced to allow it to be propelled to an otherwise impossible velocity (by all rights the mass effect universe should be a lot more powerful than it is) the key however is that when the slug exits the barrel (and its associated mass effect field) it retains its previous velocity, but its mass increases gaining kinetic energy from effectively nowhere.

In our hypothetical 3,000 c example, if the ship normally masses 200 tons and hits a planet at full speed, it will deliver energy equivalent to a bit more than 2 megatons of TNT (assuming the mass effect field remains intact until the ship's kinetic energy is more or less spent). The scary thing happens if the ship's mass effect field blinks out immediately before or during the impact, for reasons I will detail below. (and assuming relativity remains functional)

When the mass effect field blinks off, the 3,000 c ship should stay at its present velocity from all perspectives, but moving FTL is impossible under relativity. Therefore the ship suddenly switches to high-relativistic velocity with a time dilation (Lorentz) factor of 3,000 (roughly). To put this into perspective, if the Lorentz factor were 2 (which happens at 0.86 c for those interested) the ship would hit as if its entire mass were converted to energy on impact, which comes out to 4 teratons for a 200 ton ship, for those interested. I shy away from trying to calculate the kinetic energy of an object with a Lorentz factor of 3,000, but remember how Taetrus was hit by a ship at 'near FTL' speeds in the back story? By all rights Taetrus should no longer exist except possibly as an asteroid field.

Getting away from the prospect of one-shotting reapers by the 1,000 with a relatively cheap weapons system the size of a tissue box, I will discuss other issues with mass effect FTL, starting with charge. Charge is just silly, as it is already possible in real life to convert static electricity to a useful current. The biggest problem would be provisions. You simply must realize that unless a ship is large enough to sustain agriculture (like a Quarian liveship) or you are robots (like the Geth), the distance you can travel is limited by 2 things, namely 1: how fast your ship can go and 2: how long it will Be until the crew eat all of the available food. With the Relays (those foul Reapers) removing much of the reason to explore and the general scarcity of garden worlds, it makes sense that an insufficiently paranoid civilization would develop into the sort of low density empire the Reapers need to be victorious.

However an extremely paranoid civilization would likely put any relays they found on a collision course with the nearest black hole and become an extremely high density empire grabbing everything in range and living in hollowed out asteroids or other space habitats if a terraformable or gqrden world were unavailable.


	2. Chapter 2

**Mass Accelerators: missed potential**

It is already known that the main gun of a Mass Effect dreadnought accelerates its payload to roughly 4,000 km/s. As discovered via math (with a bit of help from the previous chapter) the council races have the ability to reduce mass (at least) to the degree that expending 1 m/s worth of delta v can accelerate a ship by 3,000 km/s. If the interior of a mass accelerator were even mass lightened by 1% of the intensity used in an FTL drive that means that the dreadnought's main gun is only applying enough energy to accelerate its slug by 133.333 m/s. To put this into context, the muzzle velocity of the colt m1911 is ~250 m/s, which would (if mass lightened to the same degree) accelerate its bullet to a terrifying 7,500 km/s and deliver 337.5 gigajoules of kinetic energy to its target (which is roughly equivalent to ~80 tons of TNT). The theoretical railguns the U.S. military are testing have an (expected) muzzle velocity of 5.8 km/s, which maps to 174,000 km/s (to put that in context, the speed of light is ~300,000 km/s). And advanced "FUTURE TECH" railguns would likely be even more powerful, thus getting into the 'FTL field collapse' scenario detailed in the previous chapter.

Worth noting is that the infantry scale weaponry is still reasonably accurate, as you would rather have higher ammo capacity than have individual soldiers toting WMD rifles. However, given that the bullets in mass effect guns are sheared off a single block of polymer it would make sense for there to still be a "whatever is in front of me will die in the next 3 milliseconds" mode. In addition, pre-eezo firearms modified with mass-lightening systems would probably become extremely popular black market items (though they would probably have settings ranging from 'normal rifle' to 'who needs nukes?' for varying purposes). It should also be noted that these hypervelocity shenanigans will be absolute hell in terms of barrel wear, and bullets fired in an atmosphere will tend to ablate into plasma, they also have the potential to trigger nuclear fusion as they travel.

It is worth noting, however, that mass accelerators have uses beyond destruction (as detailed below)

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**Energy: eternal power**

As you may have noticed, mass accelerators "cheat". When the slug is being accelerated it uses far less energy than normal to reach an absolutely insane velocity, then once it leaves the mass effect field it suddenly gets an awful lot of kinetic energy from absolutely nowhere. The question in this case is "what would happen if I had a wimpy mass accelerator set up like the piston in an internal combustion engine and connected a whole lot of them to a drive shaft that was cranking a generator?" This is a very good question. The "piston", assuming it massed 1 ton and delivered 1 megajoule of energy per hit (and yes it does have to be a hit, for reasons detailed below) would only need to be moving 44.7 m/s, which is trivial for a mass accelerator. However, if it's connected directly to the crankshaft, that has its normal inertia, which necessitates that the piston either be separate from the slug (which acts as a hammer against the piston) or that the crankshaft be mass lightened (more trouble than its worth).

A "supercharged" version of this is something I personally prefer to call the particle beam turbine. In it a mass-lightened hall-effect thruster (for example) which would normally accelerate its throughput to ~60 km/s instead accelerates its payload to relativistic velocities (indeed, the particles are actually superluminal for a brief period) thus multiplying the input power by some insanely huge number I can't be bothered to calculate once they leave the area of high-intensity mass lightening. This stream of relativistic particles is then used to (as the name implies) spin a turbine which is used to generate electrical power. This also has the effect of inducing a significant quantity of net thrust in the direction of the turbine. This can still work when a ship is at FTL (albeit at reduced power) as long as the accelerator portion of the device has a significantly higher degree of mass-lightening than the turbine part. In any case the primary limits to the system are how much abuse the turbine end of the device can take from constant bombardment with relativistic xenon atoms (or other such things). To counteract the thrust when you don't want to go anywhere it's generally a good idea to have multiple particle beam turbines operating in opposite directions.


	3. Chapter 3

**Kinetic Barriers: inaccurately depicted**

Now, the baseline kinetic barrier supposedly works using 'repulsive emitters' which push the incoming slug away. This makes no sense unless the 'emitters' are at a high enough intensity to be producing transient white holes. However, there are 2 effects you can achieve with the aid of mass effect fields that would allow for the creation of a formidable defensive shield. I have decided to call these effects the **Speed Limit** and the **Compass**.

Let's start with the **Speed Limit**, shall we? The first thing you need to know about it is that credit for it goes to RobertGS who brought it to my attention in the reviews. In this system a high mass/slow light mass effect field is projected around the ship, in which the speed of light is reduced to say, 3,000 km/s for the purpose of this example. when the slug enters this field it effectively undergoes 'FTL field collapse' as detailed in chapter 1 thus limiting its velocity to under 3,000 km/s relative to the ship at the cost of increasing its kinetic energy. Normally this would be bad, however the high mass/slow light field is in fact sort of 'floating' on top of the low mass/fast light field the ship in question uses to save delta v. In total, this robs the slug of an insane amount of kinetic energy.

Next is the **Compass**, which is only called that because I couldn't think of a good name. After an incoming shell passes through the speed limit, it has a greatly lowered velocity if it was going too fast, but it'll still hit the ship (which is no good). The solution is to have an extremely powerful rotating magnetic field inside the low mass zone, which can easily bat aside incoming shots. Now, this could normally be punched through by a slug moving at sufficient velocity, but there's the problem of there being the speed limit in the way. This effectively renders a properly designed ship immune to dumb-fired kinetic weaponry. But please note that I specified 'dumb-fired'.

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**Penetrating a kinetic barrier: easier than it looks**

Now, we've already determined that a dumb-fired slug has no real chance of hitting a properly designed ship unless it masses several hundred tons. However a shell with an active guidance system along with a very specifically tuned mass effect field projector and a computer that can process information at FTL speeds could likely penetrate with few problems. Here's how a dumb-fired projectile encountering the hard-science kinetic barrier I described above would likely go.

1: slug encounters speed limit, is slowed greatly.  
2: slug exits speed limit, having been robbed of the vast majority of its kinetic energy.  
3: an extremely intense rapidly spinning magnetic field bats the incoming slug aside harmlessly.

A theoretical 'smart penetrator' round would react to each step as follows.

1: slug encounters speed limit, is slowed greatly.

The smart round projects a low mass/fast light field to counteract the speed limit immediately before entering its main area of effect (maybe 10% of its velocity is lost from the outermost edges of the speed limit).

2: slug exits speed limit, having been robbed of the vast majority of its kinetic energy.

In this step, the slug counteracts the low mass/fast light field by projecting a high mass/slow light field reducing c to 50,000 km/s (which should be slower than its velocity after exiting the speed limit) thus intentionally triggering an 'FTL field collapse' event with a Lorentz factor somewhere between 4 and 6. this results in the slug's kinetic energy per kilogram suddenly jumping into the double digit gigatons at the very least.

3: an extremely intense rapidly spinning magnetic field bats the incoming slug aside harmlessly.

The effectiveness of this step is dependent on the slug both having low mass and having been slowed significantly by the speed limit. As neither of these is true (at least to the degree the designers hoped) the smart penetrator round blasts straight through.

However bear in mind that the 'smart penetrator' round requires a computer with femtosecond reaction times and a time to shift its mass not much longer than that, practically demanding that the processor core is an optical computer in a low mass/fast light mass effect field. This is likely to trigger an arms race of sorts between the speed limits having an ever sharper and more chaotic leading edge in an attempt to crush the computer controlling the smart penetrator round and the computers having ever-faster reaction times to weather the speed limit.


	4. Chapter 4

**Biotics: good for only 1 thing**

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Biotics are people with eezo in their bodies and the ability to manipulate it. Off the top of my head I can think of several ways to kill someone without even touching warps or singularities such as:

**-** briefly reducing someone's mass while running and watching them catapult away at thousands of km/s

\- reducing the mass of the blood in their heart, wreaking havoc with their blood pressure (possibly resulting in a goresplosion)

\- increasing the mass of some vital organ so it rips free of their ribcage

\- reducing someone else's mass while kicking them (let's mess with the physics engine, YAY!)

\- reduced mass baseball+throwing arm=improvised mass accelerator

\- increasing the mass of someone's blood and watching as some incredibly painful medical condition related to not getting enough blood to vital organs takes them out

Telekinesis can be achieved by stimulating an artificial gravity well, but it will be imprecise and tend to end in a way similar to katamari damacy if kept up for an extended period.

However the most devastating thing a biotic can possibly do pertains to the weird way mass effect fields interact with temperature.

If you payed attention in science class, you probably know that temperature is based on atoms moving around randomly and banging into each other. This means temperature is a form of kinetic energy. When someone's mass is reduced, the energetic chemical reactions that power them are still producing the same amount of energy, but that same amount of energy is suddenly resulting in their atoms catapulting around at hundreds of km/s. As long as their mass stays lightened or the amount of lightening is reduced gradually, the person in question will be (mostly) fine with some possibility for overheating unless their biological homeostasis freaks out after realizing that their temperature is technically in the low millions of degrees and tries to correct this, resulting in hypothermia. However, like an FTL drive the really scary thing happens if the mass lightening fails suddenly. When that happens, the 'technically' bit of 'their temperature is technically in the low millions of degrees' goes away and they sublimate into hypervelocity plasma almost instantly.

It's that weird interaction with temperature which is the primary reason that FTL is likely to be the only civilian application for eezo besides communications ever. However (as I will detail in the next installment) those comm buoys and relays have quite the potential for horror on their own.


	5. Chapter 5

**Relays &amp; Comm. buoys **  
(NOTE: there are 2 feasible explanations for relays and comm. buoys. Either they are "Go ludicrously fast" machines (interpretation 1), or they're wormholes (interpretation 2).) in this chapter I will be covering interpretation 1.

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**Comm. buoys (int****erpretation 1): humongous death rays pretending to be communications systems**

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A comm. buoy in the mass effect series officially works by projecting a 'mass free corridor' and firing a laser or radio communication down it to a receiver. However, even if the speed of light were 3,000,000 c (the same as in an FTL drive) that would still be roughly 2 weeks for a message to cross the galaxy. In addition, a comm. buoy is a _light based_ system, when the main reason lasers (also a _light based_ system) aren't the primary weapons in mass effect is because of beam dispersion. This means that comm. buoys should have a _limited range _of perhaps a dozen light years at most, and that's for a phased array 20 km across (no I didn't actually do the math for that, I just guessed).

In addition, if you can transmit information at FTL speeds, you can also transmit _sensor pings. _The only POSSIBLE excuse for there not being FTL sensors in mass effect is Reaper interference. Comm. buoys also prove that the council has the technological aptitude required to focus and direct mass effect fields at _interstellar ranges_, to be blunt I'm surprised that the council didn't come up with a system to shoot down Reapers entering a system using black holes (oh wait... indoctrination...). Lastly, assuming that each square meter of phased array is worth 100 kilowatts of laser power (which is a bit pessimistic), a 20 km wide phased array would still be a 31,400 gigawatt laser. If you used that trick abusing the mass effect's interaction with temperature I detailed last chapter you could (at minimum) increase the system's effective firepower by 3,000 (the same intensity as for a mass accelerator). to put this into context, 1 second of exposure from this weapon (sorry, I meant _transmitter)_ is equivalent to 22.5 megatons of TNT (at minimum), which could easily vaporize a Reaper (especially since those are _kinetic_ barriers).

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**Mass Relays (interpretation 1): the ultimate artillery**

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A relay operates in a similar way to a comm. buoy, that should be understood. Assuming that they accelerate the ship using them to the equivalent of 3 km/s, which maps to 100,000,000 c (3 light years per second), a relay reduces mass to the degree that c is 100,000,000,000,000 times greater than normal. It makes sense for there to be a catching relay to slow down a ship, since otherwise you'd end up with the mother of all FTL field collapse events. To put this in context, an FTL field collapse event results in the object in question moving in the same direction with a relativistic speed such that its time dilation (Lorentz) factor is equivalent to its previous rate of travel in multiples of (external) c. A civilian ship undergoing FTL field collapse at 3,000 c could realistically reduce an earth-sized planet to a new asteroid belt. A weaponized relay can deliver (at minimum) 30,000 times more energy per shot.

If relativistic mass works the way Rule of Cool says it does (hint: it probably doesn't but who cares), this should be enough for the projectile to crush stars into degenerate matter, yank planets out of orbit on a near miss, and possibly produce that terrible horror of the universe, a black hole moving only infinitesimally slower than light.

As to how the Relays operate, an extremely intense low mass/fast light field is projected as a sort of 'tube' stretching hundreds or thousands of light years. The ship in question is then catapulted forwards through this tube via some mechanism I'm not entirely certain of (probably working by twisting spacetime a bit). The receiving/catching relay then decelerates the ship via the same mechanism before doing **_something_** to prevent the temperature problem I detailed last chapter. The catching relay is necessary, as without it when the ship in question exited the low-mass tube it would not only become a potentially star-killing RKV, it would also explode into plasma.


	6. Chapter 6

**Comm. buoys &amp; relays (interpretation 2)**

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**BLAH BLAH BLAH, WORMHOLES, HUGE POWER USAGE, RELAYS NEED TO HAVE AN ENERGY OUTPUT SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE HIGHER THAN AN ENTIRE GALAXY!**

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**Medigel: the first step on the road to immortality**

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Now, this is a slight departure from my normal fare, as it doesn't involve eezo. However, I think it is worth paying attention to. Medigel is a substance that, in universe allows the complete healing of a gunshot wound in perhaps 15 minutes. It is also stated to be a product of genetic engineering. It would therefore make sense for humans to have developed an artificial symbiotic bacterium that constantly excretes medigel. This would lead to humans having an almost krogan-level healing factor.

Also, if there's a symbiotic bacterium that makes magic regen sauce (medigel), it would be trivial to produce one that excretes telomerase. What's telomerase you ask? You see, on the ends of our DNA are these things called telomeres that prevent genetic corruption when a cell divides. Over the course of your life, your telomeres get shorter and shorter, until your cells eventually lose the ability to divide. What telomerase does is extend your telomeres. Normally, telomerase only exists in your reproductive organs, but if it could be made to exist in all your regular cells, you would be effectively immune to old age.

Finally, hunter-killer bacteria could be designed to murder cancer cells and pathogens. This would lead to humans in this universe having an immune system strong enough to shrug off just about anything, as well as making human tissue incredibly toxic to eat for any non-human. In addition, these hunter-killer bacteria would be a **perfect **biological weapon for use against non-humans.

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**FTL (revisited): There is no speed limit**

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I've already discussed how an FTL drive can easily be used to destroy a planet. That's not what I'm talking about at the moment. Back in chapter 1, I determined that the council races could reduce mass to the degree that c was 3,000,000 times greater than its normal value, bu that they didn't normally go faster than a few thousand c to save fuel. However, the particle beam turbines I discussed in chapter 2 have no such limits as 'fuel' for either energy or thrust. This means, that if the ship normally accelerates at 1 g, it instead accelerates at 3,000,000 gs. The reduced mass of the passengers, however, prevents them from being liquefied by this, and the ship breaks the light barrier in about 10 seconds. Bear in mind, this ship could keep up said acceleration forever (theoretically), meaning that there is only 1 excuse for the Council races not cruising around at 1,000,000 c as a matter of course. Indoctrination. In addition, the Reapers could move at multiple trillions of c, as the relays can move a ship at least 100,000,000 c, and they only add the energy equivalent of accelerating the ship by 3 km/s.

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**Mass accelerators: a slight adjustment**

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Back in chapter 2, I made the foolish mistake of assuming that muzzle velocity to barrel length had a linear relationship, which is not the case. Instead, a mass accelerator accelerates its projectile at a constant rate until it exits the barrel. If we had a rather wimpy coilgun 100 meters long that accelerated its projectile at 2,000 m/s/s, the bullet will remain within the barrel for 0.23 seconds and have a muzzle velocity of 447 m/s. Now we mass lighten the gun's interior by 1,000. The bullet is now accelerating at 2,000,000 m/s/s, remaining within the barrel for 0.007 seconds with a muzzle velocity of 14,142 m/s. As you can clearly see, this is NOT a linear relationship, with a severe case of diminishing returns.

In the case of the navy's planned railgun I mentioned back in chapter 2, it has a relatively short barrel I'll estimate at 10 meters for the purposes of this thought exercise. It also has a muzzle velocity of 5,800 m/s. this means it accelerates its bullets at 3,364,000 m/s/s and remains in the gun for 0.0018 seconds if you want to be generous. Mass lighten that by 1,000 now. At this point the bullet is accelerating at 3,364,000,000 m/s/s (~11.2 c/s/s) and exits the barrel at 183,412 m/s after spending roughly 0.0000545 seconds in the gun.

We now scale up our theoretical gun that accelerates its projectile at 3,364,000,000 m/s/s to 1 kilometer in length and find that the bullet only comes out at 1,834,121 m/s after spending roughly 0.000545 seconds in the gun. This indicates that for 10 times the firepower you either need a gun 100 times the length, or a gun that accelerates the bullet faster. Well, we know how to accelerate the bullet faster don't we? Just intensify the mass effect field.

As determined in chapter 1, the council races have the capability to reduce mass to 1/3,000,000 of its normal amount. Therefore, if we multiply the non mass-lightened acceleration for that near future railgun I described by 3,000,000 we find that it accelerates its bullets at 100,920,000,000,000 m/s/s (~33,640 c/s). For the 10 meter gun this results in a muzzle velocity of 31,767,908 m/s (~0.1 c) with 0.0000003 seconds being spent in the gun. The 1 km gun results in a muzzle velocity of 317,679,083 m/s (which is actually slightly above c, and thus causes a low-level FTL field collapse event upon exiting the gun) with 0.000003 seconds being spent in the gun. A theoretical 1 meter gun (some sort of bull-pup rifle) would have a muzzle velocity of 10,045,895 m/s with 0.00000007 seconds spent in the gun (assuming the bullet being used is identical to those in the ship-mounted guns, which I highly doubt)


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's Note:** This is less of a full-fledged chapter, and more of a reply to a guest review.

Recoil behaves exactly as if the gun was not mass-lightened, which means it will behave as if the gun were firing its bullets much slower. A mass accelerator creates kinetic energy ex nihilo, as it works by vastly reducing the amount of energy needed to accelerate the bullet. Therefore an accelerator that accelerates its bullet at 3,364,000 m/s/s will only ever experience 67,280,000 newtons of recoil (large, but managable) (assuming a normally 20 kilogram slug) regardless of mass lightening. And remember, the more you mass lighten the gun both the faster the bullet comes out and the less time you need to deal with said recoil.


	8. Chapter 8

**Author's Note:** This is another response to a reviewer's question.

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The Thanix seems to be a mass accelerator, save that the projectile is molten.

In the Over Analysis verse, this actually makes it _less_ effective as it has no way of countering the speed limit to maintain is its insane velocity, can't increase its mass enough on short enough notice to avoid getting slammed off to the side, and the being really hot part doesn't really have any effect unless it actually hits. In short, vs. Over Analysis Kinetic Barriers the Thanix gets lolnoped.


End file.
